The social media landscape is still a jungle for many financial institutions, but a few have cut a clear path for themselves. Vantage Credit Union in St. Louis, for example, said it has improved customer engagement markedly by allowing members to access Facebook and Twitter from within online banking; those customers who do so spend twice as much time on the credit union’s website as the users who do not. The much larger SunTrust Banks Inc. started its own social media program about a year ago. Since then, SunTrust said, it has had conversations with about 15,000 customers on Facebook and 1,500 on Twitter. (SunTrust has 5 million customers.) A survey Fiserv Inc. released in November shows the potential of a strong social media strategy. It polled 3,000 online consumers and found 84% were using social media, and 11% connected to their financial institutions this way.

Bank CIOs will be charged with pursuing major tech projects — including compliance, core systems and mobile banking initiatives — in 2011, members of BS&T’s Reader Advisory Board report. The good news is, they’re likely to have more money to complete them. Banks have big things in store for their technology in 2011. After several years of reactionary cost containment, the industry is looking forward to better times, and many financial services firms are prepared to increase their investments in IT in the year ahead. In fact, based on insight from members of Bank Systems & Technology’s newly formed Reader Advisory Board, most banks will undertake major systems upgrades in the next 12 months.

Mobile network providers are feeling the crunch as consumers are demanding more applications, richer content and value-added services. A recent Alcatel-Lucent study determined that consumers have an ever-growing appetite for social networking, entertainment and information, all delivered over the mobile network. When you add mobile banking to the mix, the pressure is intense. The explosive growth in demand has helped to create an environment that is dominated by third-party application and content providers (ACPs), as captured in this report. According to Alcatel-Lucent officials, ACPs are delivering more than the applications and content that are generating the significant increase in traffic; they are also benefitting from the revenue associated with the value they deliver.